ZENNA SEZU: Not Tainted by Chin Pulling
SHUSHO ONOZUKARA ZENNA SEZU
SHU practice, training
SHO verification, experience, enlightenment
ONOZUKARA, naturally, by itself, inherently
ZENNA SEZU is not tainted
SHUSHO ONOZUKARA ZENNA SEZU
“Practice-and-experience is naturally untainted.”
Untainted by what?
I, along with many others, habitually tend to answer that question by pulling back the head.
In boxing, for example, this tendency is recognized as dangerous. The tendency to pull back the head, unless checked, causes the chin to raise up. And every boxer knows that it is not wise to lead with the chin. A boxer who leads with the chin is very susceptible to a blow from one side that will cause the skull to spin rapidly towards the opposite side, which is not a happy experience for the brain.
So boxers in England are taught to keep the chin tucked in. The corresponding instruction in Japan is “ago o hiku,” pull in the chin.
The same instruction, “ago o hiku,” pull in the chin, or “sukoshi ago o hiku,” tuck the chin in a bit, is used by modern-day Zen teachers in Japan. It doesn’t appear in Master Dogen’s rules of sitting-zen at all. I was told that it belongs to “ku-den,” an oral transmission. But I think that so-called oral transmission is not the ancient tradition, and is not the authentic rule. To pull in the chin is just to taint the practice and experience of sitting-zen.
In the few months before I left Japan, at the end of 1994, I met a few times with Tsunemasa Abe, an independent Zen teacher with the spirit of a wild fox. Abe Sensei’s father was a good pal of Master Kodo Sawaki, and old Master Kodo would sometimes stay with the Abe family during the New Year holidays, for example. So old Master Kodo was a grandfather figure to the young Tsunemasa, who started joining in at sitting-zen retreats from the age of about 11. Abe Sensei told me for example how Master Kodo had taught him in detail how to make a good job of taking a piss, not to be in a hurry but to shake off every last drop. The point is that Abe Sensei’s connection with old Master Kodo was very close. Abe Sensei told me that at the end of sitting-zen retreats, Master Kodo used to get severe neck pain, which young Tsunemasa would try to relieve with the aid of a wet towel. Abe Sensei said that, towards the end of his life, Master Kodo recognized that he had been making too much physical effort to maintain a good posture in sitting-zen, and so in his old age he changed his way of sitting and eased off a bit. The phrase which Abe Sensei often repeated in Japanese was, Ningen ga kibaru, “Human beings strain themselves.” For a living Abe Sensei worked as a therapist, using a kind of deep massage technique evolved by his father, and also using hot spring therapy. He spoke a lot about the flow of Ki, by which he meant, as far as I understood it, the vital energy of the universe. As far as Zen teachers were concerned, Abe Sensei completely revered Master Kodo and only Master Kodo.
Before meeting Abe Sensei I had assumed, from reading To Meet the Real Dragon et cetera, that my teacher Gudo Nishijima had also been a disciple of Master Kodo. But Abe Sensei told me that no, it wasn’t so. Master Kodo was choosy about who he accepted as a disciple. When I checked this information out with Gudo himself, he confirmed that it was true -- Gudo continued to attend Master Kodo’s lectures, retreats, and so on, but not as Master Kodo’s formal disciple. And when, in his old age, Master Kodo changed his method of sitting, Gudo by that time was busy with his work on Shobogenzo and as head of Japan Securities and so he was no longer in close contact with Master Kodo.
The above is all background to what I want to say about pulling in the chin. At the same time as I was going to visit Abe Sensei, which I did at his therapy centre in Tokyo, at his family’s old house in Shizuoka (where, incidentally, many of Master Kodo’s effects were stored), and at a hot spring resort called Tamagawa Onsen, I had started having Alexander lessons in Tokyo. I had therefore began to understand that the way I had been taught to sit, pulling my chin back into my neck, was a gross form of end-gaining.
Pulling in the chin in sitting-zen is end-gaining because it is to respond to the desire to sit upright by doing something specific, rather than proceeding from the principle of oneness of the whole body-mind, or, to put it another way, the principle of accepting and using the self.
When I discussed with Abe Sensei the business of pulling in the chin, it turned out that, notwithstanding his admonition that “human beings strain themselves,” he also remained an advocate of pulling in the chin. If you don’t pull in the chin, he said, then the neck won’t be stretched out. That, from an Alexandrian point of view, is bullshit. I have no hesitation in saying that it is bullshit. If Master Kodo taught people to sit like that when he was young, he was wrong. If Master Kodo still taught people to sit like that when he was old, he was still wrong.
It is true that the tendency to pull the head back is the original cause of dis-ease in sitting-zen. But to counter that tendency by doing something like tucking in the chin, is just to redouble the disease. This, for me, is the original meaning of the phrase that Master Dogen discusses in Shobogenzo: “redoubling the disease.”
FM Alexander also recognized pulling back of the head as a wrong tendency. It was a wrong tendency that was causing him to go hoarse while trying to project his voice on stage. So FM set about solving this problem, sometimes known as “clergyman’s throat,” as he described in his book The Use of the Self.
Alexander eventually recognized that to pull the head back was to do something. So, rather than countering the tendency to pull the head back by doing something else, Alexander sought a way to stop doing the wrong thing in the first place.
He describes in The Use of the Self (for a summary, see the transcription of Marjory Barlow’s talk on www.the-middle-way.org) how he traced the source of the wrong tendency deeper and deeper within, until he eventually found that the secret was to inhibit the desire to feel right in the gaining of his end.
Alexander’s original end was to recite well, but, after solving his own problem, he realized the technique he had evolved to solve his own problem had universal application to the gaining of other ends as well.
Recently I spoke on the phone with my wife in England, just after she resumed her job, after a break in August, of teaching Alexander Technique in the water. She told me of her renewed sense of joy and job satisfaction, seeing the face of a nervous man light up after losing, for the first time, his fear of submerging his face in the water.
The way my wife, brother, and sister-in law (“Swimming Without Stress”) teach is first just to get the customer feeling comfortable in the water. For the first several lessons they don’t even raise the question of swimming as an end to be gained. First they ensure that the person is happy in the water. They follow what FM Alexander called “the means-whereby” approach.
As with swimming, so with sitting-zen. The means-whereby approach of Dogen, Nagarjuna, Gautama, is wholesome, subtle, wise. In its wake follow ease and happiness. Its polar opposite is the end-gaining approach which, as I know well from long experience, is dis-integrative, crude, stupid. Its legacy is fear and its hallmark, which I see so often in the mirror, is grim determination.
It is all very well to elucidate the theoretical distinction that Master Dogen draws in Shobogenzo between polishing a tile (means-whereby) and trying to make a mirror (end-gaining). That theoretical distinction, without true practical guidance, is not worth much.
Alexander’s genius was first to observe what his own end-gaining meant in practice, in the non-abstract terms of pulling back the head, and secondly to find a practical means-whereby he could prevent that reaction in “carrying out an activity against the habit of life.” He didn’t proceed from theory to practice. His theory of “end-gaining vs means-whereby” grew out of practical investigation.
This will be my last post this summer from France; it has been a summer full of growth and I am glad to now find myself endeavoring to clarify the real meaning of Fukan-zazen-gi, like this, using this blog, which involves no financial costs and benefits, either to writer or to reader. This feels like what I am here to do. Somebody recommended me recently “to do more to market yourself as a teacher of Zen” by means of “a nice touchy feely website.” like his own.
But no, fuck that. What is the point of promoting a self that is totally tainted by end-gaining? What I am now endeavoring to do is to promote the practice-and-experience that is inherently untainted, primarily by really enjoying it myself, in the context of a simple life. Writing this blog fits into that scheme of things nicely enough.
My friend is concerned that my efforts appear to be wasted judging from the number of comments received. But I am not in the business of producing stuff for a mass market. Two sitting-zen practitioners who have known me for many years have expressed the view to me in private emails that what I am writing now is the dogs bollocks. That for me is a measure of success.
“Do more to market yourself” says my friend. But I am mindful of Marjory Barlow’s advice: “When successful, do less.”
SHU practice, training
SHO verification, experience, enlightenment
ONOZUKARA, naturally, by itself, inherently
ZENNA SEZU is not tainted
SHUSHO ONOZUKARA ZENNA SEZU
“Practice-and-experience is naturally untainted.”
Untainted by what?
I, along with many others, habitually tend to answer that question by pulling back the head.
In boxing, for example, this tendency is recognized as dangerous. The tendency to pull back the head, unless checked, causes the chin to raise up. And every boxer knows that it is not wise to lead with the chin. A boxer who leads with the chin is very susceptible to a blow from one side that will cause the skull to spin rapidly towards the opposite side, which is not a happy experience for the brain.
So boxers in England are taught to keep the chin tucked in. The corresponding instruction in Japan is “ago o hiku,” pull in the chin.
The same instruction, “ago o hiku,” pull in the chin, or “sukoshi ago o hiku,” tuck the chin in a bit, is used by modern-day Zen teachers in Japan. It doesn’t appear in Master Dogen’s rules of sitting-zen at all. I was told that it belongs to “ku-den,” an oral transmission. But I think that so-called oral transmission is not the ancient tradition, and is not the authentic rule. To pull in the chin is just to taint the practice and experience of sitting-zen.
In the few months before I left Japan, at the end of 1994, I met a few times with Tsunemasa Abe, an independent Zen teacher with the spirit of a wild fox. Abe Sensei’s father was a good pal of Master Kodo Sawaki, and old Master Kodo would sometimes stay with the Abe family during the New Year holidays, for example. So old Master Kodo was a grandfather figure to the young Tsunemasa, who started joining in at sitting-zen retreats from the age of about 11. Abe Sensei told me for example how Master Kodo had taught him in detail how to make a good job of taking a piss, not to be in a hurry but to shake off every last drop. The point is that Abe Sensei’s connection with old Master Kodo was very close. Abe Sensei told me that at the end of sitting-zen retreats, Master Kodo used to get severe neck pain, which young Tsunemasa would try to relieve with the aid of a wet towel. Abe Sensei said that, towards the end of his life, Master Kodo recognized that he had been making too much physical effort to maintain a good posture in sitting-zen, and so in his old age he changed his way of sitting and eased off a bit. The phrase which Abe Sensei often repeated in Japanese was, Ningen ga kibaru, “Human beings strain themselves.” For a living Abe Sensei worked as a therapist, using a kind of deep massage technique evolved by his father, and also using hot spring therapy. He spoke a lot about the flow of Ki, by which he meant, as far as I understood it, the vital energy of the universe. As far as Zen teachers were concerned, Abe Sensei completely revered Master Kodo and only Master Kodo.
Before meeting Abe Sensei I had assumed, from reading To Meet the Real Dragon et cetera, that my teacher Gudo Nishijima had also been a disciple of Master Kodo. But Abe Sensei told me that no, it wasn’t so. Master Kodo was choosy about who he accepted as a disciple. When I checked this information out with Gudo himself, he confirmed that it was true -- Gudo continued to attend Master Kodo’s lectures, retreats, and so on, but not as Master Kodo’s formal disciple. And when, in his old age, Master Kodo changed his method of sitting, Gudo by that time was busy with his work on Shobogenzo and as head of Japan Securities and so he was no longer in close contact with Master Kodo.
The above is all background to what I want to say about pulling in the chin. At the same time as I was going to visit Abe Sensei, which I did at his therapy centre in Tokyo, at his family’s old house in Shizuoka (where, incidentally, many of Master Kodo’s effects were stored), and at a hot spring resort called Tamagawa Onsen, I had started having Alexander lessons in Tokyo. I had therefore began to understand that the way I had been taught to sit, pulling my chin back into my neck, was a gross form of end-gaining.
Pulling in the chin in sitting-zen is end-gaining because it is to respond to the desire to sit upright by doing something specific, rather than proceeding from the principle of oneness of the whole body-mind, or, to put it another way, the principle of accepting and using the self.
When I discussed with Abe Sensei the business of pulling in the chin, it turned out that, notwithstanding his admonition that “human beings strain themselves,” he also remained an advocate of pulling in the chin. If you don’t pull in the chin, he said, then the neck won’t be stretched out. That, from an Alexandrian point of view, is bullshit. I have no hesitation in saying that it is bullshit. If Master Kodo taught people to sit like that when he was young, he was wrong. If Master Kodo still taught people to sit like that when he was old, he was still wrong.
It is true that the tendency to pull the head back is the original cause of dis-ease in sitting-zen. But to counter that tendency by doing something like tucking in the chin, is just to redouble the disease. This, for me, is the original meaning of the phrase that Master Dogen discusses in Shobogenzo: “redoubling the disease.”
FM Alexander also recognized pulling back of the head as a wrong tendency. It was a wrong tendency that was causing him to go hoarse while trying to project his voice on stage. So FM set about solving this problem, sometimes known as “clergyman’s throat,” as he described in his book The Use of the Self.
Alexander eventually recognized that to pull the head back was to do something. So, rather than countering the tendency to pull the head back by doing something else, Alexander sought a way to stop doing the wrong thing in the first place.
He describes in The Use of the Self (for a summary, see the transcription of Marjory Barlow’s talk on www.the-middle-way.org) how he traced the source of the wrong tendency deeper and deeper within, until he eventually found that the secret was to inhibit the desire to feel right in the gaining of his end.
Alexander’s original end was to recite well, but, after solving his own problem, he realized the technique he had evolved to solve his own problem had universal application to the gaining of other ends as well.
Recently I spoke on the phone with my wife in England, just after she resumed her job, after a break in August, of teaching Alexander Technique in the water. She told me of her renewed sense of joy and job satisfaction, seeing the face of a nervous man light up after losing, for the first time, his fear of submerging his face in the water.
The way my wife, brother, and sister-in law (“Swimming Without Stress”) teach is first just to get the customer feeling comfortable in the water. For the first several lessons they don’t even raise the question of swimming as an end to be gained. First they ensure that the person is happy in the water. They follow what FM Alexander called “the means-whereby” approach.
As with swimming, so with sitting-zen. The means-whereby approach of Dogen, Nagarjuna, Gautama, is wholesome, subtle, wise. In its wake follow ease and happiness. Its polar opposite is the end-gaining approach which, as I know well from long experience, is dis-integrative, crude, stupid. Its legacy is fear and its hallmark, which I see so often in the mirror, is grim determination.
It is all very well to elucidate the theoretical distinction that Master Dogen draws in Shobogenzo between polishing a tile (means-whereby) and trying to make a mirror (end-gaining). That theoretical distinction, without true practical guidance, is not worth much.
Alexander’s genius was first to observe what his own end-gaining meant in practice, in the non-abstract terms of pulling back the head, and secondly to find a practical means-whereby he could prevent that reaction in “carrying out an activity against the habit of life.” He didn’t proceed from theory to practice. His theory of “end-gaining vs means-whereby” grew out of practical investigation.
This will be my last post this summer from France; it has been a summer full of growth and I am glad to now find myself endeavoring to clarify the real meaning of Fukan-zazen-gi, like this, using this blog, which involves no financial costs and benefits, either to writer or to reader. This feels like what I am here to do. Somebody recommended me recently “to do more to market yourself as a teacher of Zen” by means of “a nice touchy feely website.” like his own.
But no, fuck that. What is the point of promoting a self that is totally tainted by end-gaining? What I am now endeavoring to do is to promote the practice-and-experience that is inherently untainted, primarily by really enjoying it myself, in the context of a simple life. Writing this blog fits into that scheme of things nicely enough.
My friend is concerned that my efforts appear to be wasted judging from the number of comments received. But I am not in the business of producing stuff for a mass market. Two sitting-zen practitioners who have known me for many years have expressed the view to me in private emails that what I am writing now is the dogs bollocks. That for me is a measure of success.
“Do more to market yourself” says my friend. But I am mindful of Marjory Barlow’s advice: “When successful, do less.”
posted by Mike Cross at 5:59 AM
7 Comments:
Despite not knowing you for years, what you are writing now is the dog's bollocks.
The work of Master Dogen fearlessly expounded through the experience of a real life is the dog's bollocks.
I read in my Guardian's Great Interviews today this from Francis Bacon about freedom in painting:
The will to lose one's will? (David Sylvester's question)
"Absolutely. The will to make oneself completely free. Will is the wrong word, because in the end you could call it despair. Because it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it's impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, something happens."
I'm glad there won't be a 'touchy feely' website - not really you I imagine....
Many thanks, MT.
I wouldn’t claim to be fearless -- maybe, in small steps, one step forward, two steps back, more accepting of my being fearful.
And if what I am writing now is the dog’s bollocks, that is because Fukan-zazen-gi itself is just the dog’s bollocks.
Like a true Alexander teacher, what you are affirming is not me, but it.
The Francis Bacon quote is a nice one. Who needs an artificial koan to bring one to that point of despair? The Big One is readily available to all of us, at every moment.
'If you practice the ineffable for a long time, you will be ineffable. The treasure-house will naturally open, for you to receive and use as you like.'
Interestingly, Gudo's translation of this section omits to use the phrase 'for a long time.' The effect of not using this is to deny any view but that of the immediate.
In our FZ study group last night we had a healthy exchange of views between immediatists, 'process' view people and synthesists if you like. What a shower of views!
I guess I'm of the latter variety. There's no doubt in my mind that if we practise zazen for a long time we become a bit like zazen itself - we maintain and manifest a state that we practise very often. I know this because I have witnessed it in other people who practise zazen. In fact, everything in experience maintains and manifests the state of zazen, I intuit this from my own practise.
However, the only way to do this is to drop off this end-gaining idea along with everything else in the actual practise of zazen.
Please would you give us your thinking on this subject again and the characters and their translation options to inform this debate?
My roshi once asked Robert Aitken why he polluted a tradition of wordless transmission by writing so many books. Aitken replied, "Because they help people." Bringing Zen back to the "chop wood, carry water" here-now-reality level. With that encouragement, I have a problem that is utterly and boringly mundane, and could be 'end seeking' but also is just human:
Problem: when I sit, and afterward, my neck hurts! And pulling my head back a little -- without tilting or anything -- seems to help, but then my mid-back seems to hurt more.
I don't really mind sitting through pain, but pain isn't really the point, either; middle way.
Question: any suggestions?
Gassho!
Hello there Thersites, and thanks for your question.
My roshi had a very devoted student, a monk by the name of Taijun. When I went back to Japan in 1998, after completing my 3 years on an Alexander training course, I could see that Taijun was suffering from a stiff neck and headaches because of sitting as she had been taught by our roshi, pulling the chin in. I really wanted to help her. But she wasn't able to listen to a single bloody word I said, and I didn't have the wiles or experience to get through to her.
We tend to think of pain in the neck as a physical or postural problem, but finding the true cause of pain in the neck may take us on a journey back to the original root of the problem.
If that happens to you, as it happened to me, you may one day reflect that the pain in your neck was the best friend you ever had.
But if, like Taijun, you stick rigidly to blind belief in your roshi's teaching, there might not be much hope for you. Even if your roshi's teaching is true, if you adhere to it rigidly, there might not be much hope for you. In Taijun's case, her roshi's teaching was not true and she adhered to it rigidly.
So my suggestion is not to stiffen your neck in unduly rigid adherence to anything -- but then again don't err on the side of undue laxity either.
Ah! I'm fortunate, then; my roshi is not dogmatic, other than a calm confidence that returning to the basic practice, over and over, on the zafu and off, is helpful. As to posture, all I've been taught is to keep spine as erect as is consistent with its natural curves, head generally over shoulders, shoulders over elbows and hips, erect and relaxed. You know, "The Still Point" basic stuff.
So while I'm sure my pain is the result of my error or ignorance, it's probably due more to a postural error than to ideological rigidity -- though, of course, any postural problem could well be the result of a thinking problem when one digs deep!
Anyway, I'm very open to concrete suggestions -- whether that's "read this about Alexander" or "try a taller cushion"! -- and would appreciate more explication, if you think that would help.
Gassho again! I hope you are having a great day, and I appreciate your help.
Hello again,
I would encourage anybody drawn, as I was drawn, to Japanese Zen, to go back and reconsider their basic premises.
In concrete terms, you say that you are very open to any concrete suggestion I might have, but if you were really and truly open, how could sitting give you a pain in the neck?
We all tend to go forward on the basis of premises that are wrong. That has been the story of my own life.
But Master Dogen is pointing us in his rules of sitting-zen in another direction altogether: "Learn the backward step of turning the light and shining."
If you follow the link on this blog to Marjory Barlow's introduction to the FM Alexander Technique, and closely read what Marjory is saying, you may find that she is also describing a process of going back to the root of a postural problem, and finding that the problem lies originally in the manner of reaction to an idea.
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